Designing stories on social media: A corpus-assisted critical perspective on the mismatches of story-curation

At a time of increased monetization social media, there is scope and need for critical-linguistic perspectives to go beyond the focus on users’ linguistic multi-modal resources. Drawing project ‘Life-writing moment: The sharing updating self media’ (www.ego-media.org), in this article, I make case corpus-assisted critical perspective which allows scrutiny media companies’ design stories as communication features their apps. What definitions views underpin such story-features? facilities are offer posting stories, how they branded, why? Who positioned an ideal story-creator audience those address these questions with reference recent story-designing spree Snapchat Instagram. corpus analysis app feature launched discussed online incl. keyword lexical thematic associations term ‘story’, has brought fore three mismatches between marketing rhetoric or branding actual affordances offered them. These involve tensions trade-offs between: continuity ephemerality; textuality visuality; creativity control user vs. pre-selection templates customization. revealing re-designation key-ingredients particular time, memories engagement, so suit apps’ agenda metricization lives ever closer links advertising.